Revisiting The Connective Tissue

I keep meaning to put some music on, but I've been wearing my headphones in silence for ages.

I'm sitting at my desk in my office, it's mid afternoon, and I'm deep in a flow state. I've wanted to make the Monthly Dispatch available online for some time now, rather than just via email as it has been, and I sort of accidentally slid into doing something about that today.

I'm ok with it. 

I think it serves as a solid entry point for folks to keep up with Unobstructed if they're new to it, without getting too many emails. But if they don't know it exists, or can't picture what it would looked like, they may never take the plunge.

Since pretty much everything else from Unobstructed is narrative-focused long-form, the Monthly Dispatch is intentionally lighter as an update-style roundup.

Taking a deep breath, I lean back in my chair to review what I've been working on. Part of why I put this off until now is because I wanted to be able to list Monthly Dispatches among the rest of Unobstructed's home feed but couldn't. Creating and distributing the Monthly Dispatch as an email in HubSpot means it can't easily be duplicated into a web page, which is stupid. So, I configured a new tag for the site, added it to the feed filter, and then spent a fair bit of time just now transposing previous email editions of the Monthly Dispatch into their own publishable posts. They look pretty good, all things considered. I even backdated them to show up in chronological order.

 

I'm sitting there updating the same stuff over on Substack and it feels... silly. I don't have a better solution at the moment, so I'm still doing it. With a "good-enough-for-now" sigh, I begrudgingly admit that Substack is the marketplace. That's where the people are. Eventually, though, I do want to revisit the connective tissue between theunobstructed.com and its Substack counterpart...

In the meantime, I add the direct RSS feed for the Monthly Dispatch to the "featured scroll" and side panels of derekmacdonald.com. That way, they autopopulate alongside the daily column, newsletter, podcast, and blog.

With a nod, I decide to call it there.

 

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Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
306/365

How do you think about ongoing maintenance of things you know need adjusting or replacing?

onward.

For more on this daily column and The MAP Year Project, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.